Grave Disturbance: Police Investigate Officer Linked to Chetumal Body Desecration

Police are investigating one of their own in the gruesome decapitation of a man whose body was found in Chetumal and brought to Belize for burial. 27-year-old, Michael Whittaker, had his head skinned and his skull taken out of his coffin.  He was laid to rest last Wednesday and by the following day the Police were out investigating the disturbance of his gravesite.  Police Commissioner Chester Williams explained that a person of interest is a police officer, who is believed to be affiliated with narco-elements.  He noted that the officer is expected to hand himself into the Police.

Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police: “I’m not going to say much on this because I have tasked, Ive put together a team to investigate that whole issue in the north not just the civilians but also the police officers who we’re getting information of are involved and I’ve said this before and I’m going to say it again; the Belize Police Department is not going to shield no police officer who gets entangled with cartels. If you get entangled with cartels the best I can do for you is to second you to Chetumal where you can work with them. But I will not allow for police officers to be entangled with cartels and be working with other police officers who are not involved and when the cartel comes for them they end up injuring innocent police officers. It is extremely risky and so I have said that what we need to do is to investigate, identify those police officers and I don’t think transferring them is going to be helpful to us because if we transfer them they move to other areas and they recruit more police officers. So they will in essence be contaminating more police officers. So my thing is that we identify them and we get rid of them. You can’t be cartel and be police at the same time. You have to decide what you’re going to be. You can only be one. So you either define to be cartel or you decide to be police. The fact that they have decided to be cartels there’s no need or no room for them to be police officers. We have to part ways and that’s the bottom line.”

According to the Commissioner, the department is working at weeding out officers believed to be allegedly working with criminal groups.  As it relates to Whittaker, the Corozal resident was killed in Chetumal along with 18-year-old, Aaron Tun and were found at a bus stop along with three other murder victims.  Tun’s gravesite was also disturbed but the culprits were unable to penetrate the concrete to access his corpse.